Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices From Kashmir

Kali for Women

Our lives segment into many lifetimes, marked out by beginnings and endings: school, university, career, marriage, illness, children, loss, love. In each of these sub-divisions we find giants. Then we move into the next phase, pulling out a slingshot and knocking our heroes down, like any number of images of Ozymandian Saddam crashing to the ground all over Baghdad in April 2003. Among the cast of giants there are the literary ones, but those who were our iconic foundation stones at eighteen are often forgotten, or perhaps no longer relevant, twenty years later.

So, in this particular section of my life one book stands out on a courageous pedestal. I have spent much of my adult life in India. Large chunks of that time have been spent in Kashmir where I have watched a conflict unfolding, changing in nature from a separatist struggle to a self-feeding guerrilla war with too many interested and invested parties.

I have written for many papers, including Indian ones, and broadcast extensively from the valley, and the censorship has been extreme. I understand the reasons though I do not condone them. My silence became guilt.

How do you write, how do you speak, how do you bear witness in a place that has been forced into silence?

Across the years I have met women who were prepared to be shot or mutilated in order to tell the truth, to talk of their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons who had ‘disappeared’, taken by the security forces for ‘questioning’, never to reappear. These women, these ‘half widows’ as they are called, are unable to grieve over a body, and yet they have no support or hope from the state, from their local community, often even from their own families. And these same women have been like a mirror to the press pack, showing our parasitic nature in all its ugly, flak-jacketed truth. We took their stories and left. They had to stay on, their world closing in around them without their men to give them status and protection.

Then I met Urvashi Butalia, a publishing warrior, who was compiling a book: Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir. I read their stories, their fearless statements of fact. From a district officer’s wife’s account of the family flight from Muzaffarabad, now in Pakistan, during the chaos of Partition, to the searing simplicity of the words of ordinary Kashmiri women, this book shouted its way off the presses of a tiny publishing house, roaring out of the silence.

‘You must not believe everything that people tell you. You must not listen with your ears but with your heart,’ said Parveen, an exhausted doctor from Srinagar, who was struggling to stem the rising tide of suicidal depression that is part of on-going conflict.

When you read and hear real courage there is really no other option than to try find the same ‘power of facing’, as Orwell put it with such starkness.

Justine Hardy’s new novel, The Wonder House, is published by Atlantic Books.

(originally published in The Independent August 2005)